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It’s that time of year again, the time when we count our blessings and make hopeful lists for the new year, take stock and turn to thoughts of renewal.

It’s also that time of year when, taking a break from the grind and the mundane, we may have a few extra moments—after breaking bread and carving turkey with friends and family—to dive into a great read.

So we asked bestselling YA writers like Laurie Halse Anderson, Ann Brashares, and Rainbow Rowell to share the one book they’re most thankful for, one that truly changed their lives—and might just do the same for a reader or two!

I was a profoundly shy girl who stuttered and stood a head taller than her classmates. I had a quick temper. I loved swim practice, because it made me strong and nobody expected me to talk when my face was in the water.

In fifth grade I grew even taller and began to suspect that life was more complicated than the books I’d been reading about talking mice or Nancy Drew. My school librarian handed me the book that changed everything: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

School librarians belong in the ranks of angels, right between seraphim and cherubim.

I was transported by the details of life in nineteenth-century New England. I was shocked by the realities of the scarlet fever outbreak, the poverty of the Hummels, and the hardships faced by the March family with their father away at war. I sobbed when Beth died.

But the miracle of this book for me lay in the character of Jo. She loved reading and writing and running. She had big dreams and didn’t know how to reach them. She was different. She didn’t fit and that was her strength.

I am grateful for Louisa May Alcott and Jo and my swim coach and most of all, that librarian who hid her wings under a faded cardigan.

I am thankful for a book called Dreams of Victory. It sounds like the title of a Leni Riefenstahl film, but in fact is a small and lovely novel by Ellen Conford. I was in second grade when I found the book lying around my house, and had not yet developed my own relationship to reading. I was bored and I picked it up and thought: “I could never read a grown-up book like this one.” And just to prove it, I opened it to the first page. I remember lying on my bed for the next several hours, my wrist getting sore from propping up my head up (how many millions of times that has happened since!) and reading it straight through. I was giddy by the end. In one afternoon I fell in love with that book and I fell in love with reading.

There’s another reason, equally important, that I am thankful. The heroine, Victory Benneker, is scared of a lot of things and worries she isn’t good at anything. I related to her. In Victory’s daydreams she transforms her fears and failures into raptures of courage and success. By the end of the book, Victory recognizes that maybe she’s not good at acting or dancing or sports, but she really is good at telling stories and at fortifying herself by telling them. And so, a writer is born. My second-grade heart throbbed in recognition.

I believe most readers can point to a single book that sparked a life of reading. This was mine. In some way, it also sparked my life of writing.

There are so many books that I am thankful for this holiday season. Most of all, I am thankful for books period—and thankful for my living as a writer. But the book I am most thankful for is my favorite book of all time, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I was 23 years old, unpublished and depressed, and I read the novel in five months, lying on my couch, between naps. Slowly, very slowly, as I got deeper into the stories of Natasha, Prince Andrei, Pierre, Nikolai, and Princess Maria, my depression started to lift.

War and Peace, I was delighted to find, was like a splendid soap opera, juicy and full of life and fun, with marvelous descriptions of ball gowns, galas and flirtations, heartbreak, fortunes won and lost, parties and princesses. It was my kind of book, and it made me realize that I too, could write about life! And society! And lovers! And ballgowns! Because here, Leo Tolstoy, author of that classic masterpiece had done exactly that.

War and Peace re-ignited my love for literature, my faith in the world, and allowed me to get up off the couch and start writing again, and for that I will always be thankful.

It was near the end of my senior year of college. I’d been writing all these gritty spoken-word-style stories about the Mexican side of my family, about my old neighborhood, about the complexities of growing up mixed. But I never showed anyone. I was in school on a hoop scholarship. Jocks weren’t supposed to write. And it’s not like anything I was putting on the page resembled the anthologized stories we read in class. I assumed my writing would always be limited to an audience of one (me!), and I started brainstorming practical career moves for after graduation. That’s when a friend introduced me to Junot Diaz’s amazing story collection, Drown.

I was bowled over by the time I finished the first page. The prose was electric. The voice was authentic. The characters were living, breathing people who reminded me of home. For me, reading Drown that first time wasn’t like reading at all. It was a reflection. A validation. I belonged to those stories—even though they were all set in places I’d never been. Mr. Diaz’s casual, conversational tone made me feel immediately at ease, while the material challenged me both intellectually and spiritually. I still reread Drown every so often today—I even teach it in creative writing classes—but I’ll never forget the way I felt reading it back when I was twenty-three years old. It was more than just a great literary work, it was proof that those raw stories I had hidden in notebooks could, with enough work, become worthy of an audience beyond just myself.

My sister gave me a copy of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Breakfast of Champions for Christmas when I was 21 years old. Not since junior high school had I read a book that resonated with me so deeply. I’d had my own stories running around my head for years, but I always thought they were too weird to pursue. What Breakfast of Champions did was show me that there could be a place for my stories as long as I carved it out and made it my own. From the minute I read the book, I refocused my life toward becoming a writer. I am thankful for many books because of how they shaped me personally, but this one allowed me to chase a longtime dream that has grown into a job I love to do. I guess if one looks at it a certain way, it was the best Christmas gift I ever received because it was my future in 295 pages.

Reading the right book at the right time can save your life—or change it. For me, that book was The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. It’s the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his friends, tough kids from the wrong side of the tracks, who are labeled “Greasers” because they slick back their hair. The Outsiders fundamentally changed the way I viewed the world—and myself. It taught me that character is defined by the choices we make when we have the most to lose, loyalty is something you give, and courage is something you have to dig deep to find. It also reminded me that we are all outsiders, in one way or another.

I am thankful for Nina LaCour’s The Disenchantments, for sharing the truth that even though plans and dreams can fall through, there’s always a new (often better) path that replaces the one you were sure you were going to take.

And books that came along and gave me just what I needed, just when I needed it…

There might be books I love more… (Maybe.)

But there’s no book I’m more thankful for than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.

I don’t even think of Harry Potter that way—as “a book” or a series of books. I think of it as a whole world. As ten years of my life.

From 1997 to 2007, there was never a time when I wasn’t actively waiting for the next Harry Potter book.

And I’m still not done or over them.

I talk and think about Harry Potter every single day. “Muggle” has replaced “ordinary” in my vocabulary, and “Voldemort” has replaced “evil.” And I sort the whole world into Houses without consciously deciding to.

Most books—even really great books—are transient experiences, things you feel most keenly while you’re reading them.

But Harry Potter stays with you.

It’s not just that J.K. Rowling introduced us to Harry’s world in The Sorceror’s Stone—she introduced us to a whole new way of thinking about our own.

There is a sleeping giant inside all of us. A passion above all others that lazes around until an outside force yanks back the duvet and wakes it up. For me, that force was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I cracked the spine on that novel in fifth grade and my passion-giant (or giant passion) has been living la vida loca ever since.

Harriet, like you, I was an arbiter of human behavior and often miffed by what I encountered. Grown-ups with their hypocritical “Do as I say not as I do” business. The way Ali Ward sang “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” “to herself” in class—a never-ending reminder that she got Dorothy and I didn’t. And why did Josh Randolph’s pits smell like Funyuns? I wasn’t one to talk behind people’s backs, but I needed somewhere to stash these keen observations. Harriet, you had me at “spy notebook.”

I would hide under the dining-room table and record dinner-party conversations—strange topics, rude interruptions, fake laughs. I’d note the guests with the worst footwear and the ones who dropped food on the carpet. Soon, reports of mean girls and crushable boys filled the pages. Then petty grievances, personal goals, and obstacles. All those things that make us flawed and fabulous. The things good stories are made of.

What started as a connection to a character who also loved tomato sandwiches and quirky details morphed into an ardent hobby—and later a career—that woke my spirit and glitter-dusted my soul.

Growing up, I had the kind of mother who went to the bookstore every week to discuss her daughter, the one who had “read everything” and “didn’t like horse books.” I had the kind of mother who read aloud on long car trips, the kind who could almost make you see Ponyboy’s brooding face, hear the red badge of courage flapping, feel the muslin of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s dresses.

That was my mom.

“Margie’s a reader,” she would say, proudly, to anyone who would listen. “She’s already read that one.” Loving to read was the one thing that made me different from everyone else in the world. I was as special as the stories I knew, because I knew them.

When I was in third grade, I started a Dark is Rising/Susan Cooper fan club. The Dark is Rising was My Book, in a way no other book ever had been before. Pam Ling and Tessa Roper and I met under the stairs that led to our classroom bungalow (in California we had such things) in the relative schoolyard darkness. There we sat, lovingly memorizing the poem from the front of the books, imagining that we were the Old Ones. We believed that one day, we would come into powers of our own.

And I did. I found the power of my own voice. I became a writer. But that’s not how I identify. What I am, first, is a reader. My mom will tell you.

AMG/Parade Digital

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